During volume rendering, a large amount of data (e.g., gigabytes (GBs) of data) is to be loaded from a storage drive. The storage drive may store datasets to be volume rendered and may be accessed by a number of workstations in communication with the storage drive. A user at a workstation may request retrieval and volume rendering of one of the stored datasets, and based on typical background load (e.g., for preprocessing jobs and Digital Imaging and Communications in Medicine (DICOM) receive jobs), a processor associated with the storage drive, for example, may access the dataset and/or volume render the dataset at a rate of 20-400 MB/s or less. This results in the user waiting seconds or minutes at the workstation for the volume rendered dataset to be accessed and a rendered image to be displayed at the workstation.